Artist Page: Cheng Ran
Born in 1981 in Mongolia, China, the artist participated in the artist residence programme at the Royal Academy of Visual Arts in the Netherlands from 2013 to 2014. He founded the art space, Martin Goya Business, in 2017.
As a representative of China’s new generation of video and cross-media artist, Cheng Ran has been trying different art forms including film, poetry, drama, novel, and installation, etc. Relying on his vibrant mindset, sometimes detached and more often experimental spirit, he is especially good at changing the sense of space, structure and one’s conception towards the original object by undefined use of materials. The switch between texts and visual language created by the artist, allows the audience floating between the reality and the imagination, presenting the poetics of nihilism. In fact, the artist re-patches aesthetic elements as such into his own unique artistic language. His works in general reflect on the existential state of Chinese young generation under the impact of political and cultural globalisation. From these works, we can see that the artist doesn’st pay much attention on the issue of “identity”, but more on discovering new values from diverse cultures brought by globalisation. It seems that the artist’s self-judgment can’t be easily spotted, while this largely speaks of his autonomy in artistic creation. We can also find this distinguished feature in many of Cheng Ran’s works, which always reflect his deep thoughts on universal themes including the boundary, distinction, and even confrontation, marginalisation, etc. in an all-round way.